Part I:
What is my understanding of the church and its mission?
I tell stories in order to make sense of
life. That’s also the impetus behind all
scripture. I’d like to believe in a
personal God, a God who cares about me as an individual or even as a member of
humanity. I envy evangelicals and
Pentacostals their experience of a relationship with an outside force
interested in their well-being. My
experience has been what Keith Russell[1]
describes as the Peterine, a home for the homeless. It often seems there’s no one home but
there’s the need for a home. The God I’ve experienced displays little sympathy
for the poor and oppressed and helpless, doling out greater and harsher
conditions on them, while offering people like me better and warmer conditions
than we deserve. Such a God shruggingly
kills and disappears nearly a thousand people in the aftermath of a typhoon inthe Philippines while caring
enough to shift the course of a tropical storm to avoid a political gatheringin Tampa.
What’s the
purpose of worship for such a God? Is it
to placate, to ameliorate God’s anger?
It might seem so if the only reason people got together was to celebrate
such a God. But it’s obvious this God doesn’t
take comfort from the worship of people in one of the most religious regions,
southeast Asia, or the power of prayer would have had a greater effect on
Typhoon Bopha. “For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I
would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering,” the Psalmist
tells us. “’The multitude of your sacrifices--what
are they to me?…I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat
of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and
goats,’” exclaims the Isaiah writer.
The purpose of church, in my experience, is
to provide an indwelling for comfort and succor to people by people. “Finally,
all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender
heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay
evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing.
It is for this that you were called—that you might inherit a blessing... [Who]
will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? But even if you do suffer for doing what is
right, you are blessed,” the writer of 1st Peter tells us. While I may not recognize a personal God, one
that’s got anyone’s interests at heart, I see plenty to indicate a force that
binds us together. It is a connective
spiritual tissue that, like a holy game of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,”
provides a conduit for nurturing the spark that brings me in greater relation
with you.
When I
came to United Seminary, and for most of the time I’ve been here, it’s been with the
intention that I would serve a congregation that practiced that ideal, one
where the Peterine work of being a home to the homeless was the reason to get
together each week. After all, I had
already served as pastor to several congregations where, while everyone knew it
was hard work to bring about what Unitarian Universalists call the Beloved
Community, they also knew it would be ultimately rewarding and where, while
most refused making the difficult changes that we knew could result in what we
wanted, they nonetheless paid lip service at least to the need for those
changes. My intent was that if I kept at
them, they would make the changes. Incrementally.
But as
I’ve been here and as I’ve studied and watched the changes in congregationallife, not only in my own faith but in other faiths, I’ve come to realize
this: It is too late for those changes
to make a difference. Of course,
congregations aren’t going away in the immediate future—and in the long run,
something like what we’ve come in the past couple centuries to see as the common
experience of communal gathering will remain in some form—but they are dying as
swiftly as their eldest members. This
isn’t a bad thing. Like Spanish becoming
the most-spoken language in the US
But a
question I asked several weeks into this class and based on our study of DianaButler Bass’ Christianity After Religion
has stuck with me: As churches are
changing, as congregations become less “religious” and more “spiritual,”
require fewer experts and authorities to imbue what rituals remain with
holiness, what reason will they have to hire ministers? After all, if it’s true, as Butler Bass articulates,
that “Everyone
is in the same situation: a religious
bear market. Indeed, the first decade of
the twenty-first century could rightly be called the Great Religious
Recession,”[2]
then is it any wonder seminaries find themselves in terrible fiscal straits and
mainline, otherwise well-to-do denominations must ask their executives toresign if the money just isn’t coming in? My faith has retained a lot of its Christian roots, including
its predilection for ministers, but many Unitarian Universalist congregations
are proudly independent of regular ministerial oversight, and while there
remains the assumption that a congregation that chooses to call a full-time
minister has made it, many staunchly refuse to or at best look for someone
part-time.
I’ve had
two previous professional horses shot out from under me—first as a bookseller
and then as a professor—and don’t look forward, in my early 50s, to having it
done a third time. There’s the money
aspect, of course, but there’s also the sense of being a part of something
larger and greater than myself, which is why I choose to serve in the first
place. I’ve studied this situation a
lot—I’ve even written sermons about it—and none of the answers I can come up
with suggest the long-term fiscal viability of parish work. It’s for this reason I’ve chosen to seek
another option.
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